


Fucked Up, Crazy, Idiotic Love

by websters_lieb



Series: Are We Falling Together or Falling Apart [3]
Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Ian POV, M/M, Second Person, actual communication and shit, being dysfunctional but talking like grown ups, post 5x12
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-05
Updated: 2015-05-05
Packaged: 2018-03-29 02:40:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3879040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/websters_lieb/pseuds/websters_lieb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The next time you see him - after you end everything - he looks like shit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fucked Up, Crazy, Idiotic Love

The next time you see him - after you end everything - he looks like shit.

You’ve just walked into the Alibi, and you’re making your way to the bar when you notice him. His shoulders are hunched over, and he’s got a glass and a bottle in front of him. He’s pretty clearly drunk - you’d recognize the way he wobbles slightly in his seat anywhere, and it aches just to look at him. You think he’s beautiful.

You wonder if you should leave - there’s no way he wants you here - but you can’t force yourself to walk away. You seem to have forgotten parts of him. In the mental image of him that you’ve been clinging to for the last month or so, you’ve left out pieces. You hadn’t remembered the slope of his nose, the exact way that that one little strand of hair falls down towards his eyes when he can’t give enough of a shit to comb it back, the way his lips look after he’s been biting at them for a long time. The fact that you don’t remember it all, that you’ve lost any part of him, is painful beyond belief. You find yourself staring at him, your eyes tracing over every piece of him. You refuse to forget anything else.

His head perks up, and you know that this is your last chance to get away before he looks over at you, you know that he can feel you staring at him, you know that he’s trained himself to be able to tell when people are around him, you know him. He looks over his shoulder at you, his gaze measured and his shoulders stiff, and when he sees you his mouth falls open. He looks angry. He looks sad. He looks tired. He looks like he’s in pain. A hundred emotions flash through him at the speed of light, and you understand every single one of them, something you had trained yourself to do a long time ago. You ride the wave with him, taking a deep breath and trying to keep your hands from shaking.

You can’t walk away now, and you can’t just keep on staring either, so you walk forward, pulling up a chair next to him and waving at Veronica to give you a drink. She looks at you with a measuring gaze as she pours a beer and hands it to you, you just nod at her, not daring to look away from Mickey. He’s not looking at you anymore, his eyes are fixed on his glass, and he pours himself some more. From the smell, you assume that it’s jack.

He takes a large gulp, grimacing as the dark liquid goes down, and you clear your throat. “You look good.” You lie.

He scoffs, finishing off what’s left in his glass before refilling it again. You wonder how much he’s already drank. He used to drink more. Before you came back. You remember watching him get drunk as you both sat slumped in the dugouts, him with bruises coloring his chest and neck, you wanting nothing more than to kiss him better. You remember how he used to drink when he couldn’t take living in his reality anymore. You remember him drinking to forget, to erase something - his father, his wife, his rape, his life. In the last year, he’d been better, you think he must’ve been happy, because he hadn’t seemed to need to forget anything anymore, but now here he is, as drunk as you’ve ever seen, and you recognize it as his need to stop thinking. To stop thinking about you. After everything, you never thought you’d see him drinking to forget you. Not again.

“Sure.” He says, his tone bitter, and you wince a little bit. You should go, you shouldn’t put him through this, you don’t have the right to put him through this. He looks over at you, and you meet his eyes hesitantly. He’s afraid. “You too.”

This time his voice is genuine, and you swallow a little bit. “Uh,” You start, not sure of what to say. “How’ve you been?” He stares at you like your stupid, and you feel a blush creeping up your neck.

“We’re not doing this.” He says, looking away from you, shaking his head, and you frown.

“Doing what?”

He takes a sip of his drink and pours a little more into the glass even though it’s not empty yet. “That couple thing.” He pauses for a second, rubbing at his eyes. “Where we make small talk and pretend we care and then go our separate ways. I’m not fucking doing it.”

He stands up, glancing at you and then quickly away again, as if he just can’t bare to see you but can’t stop himself from looking despite it, and you reach out to grab his arm, but stop yourself when he recoils. You don’t get to touch him like that, you remind yourself. He’s walking out the door, and you know that you should let him go, but you don’t. You leave your beer mostly full and unpaid for and you ignore Vee’s angry voice as you walk away. You follow him outside and find him lighting up a cigarette a few steps away from the door. He looks back at you as you come out and then he teeters slightly away from you, as if he’s considering walking away, but you speak before he has the chance to and he stays.

“That’s not what I’m doing.” You say definitively, and he raises his eyebrows.

“Isn’t it?”

You glare at him, even though you know that you should be on your knees begging for forgiveness, you can’t help the fact that he’s always been able to make you more angry than anyone else. He has the power to make you angry, aggressive, confused beyond belief, lustful, genuinely fucking _happy_. He makes you _feel_ , and that’s more than you can say about a lot of things these days. “No.” You grind out. “I’m asking because I actually fucking care, Mickey. I want to know how your doing. I haven’t seen you for _months_. I give a shit.”

He gapes at you, and then he speaks in a dangerous, low voice that makes you back up a little bit. “ _You_ fucking care?”

He’s advancing on you, his eyes ice cold and his hands in fists. “Excuse me if it didn’t really seem like that to me. Two months, Ian, two fucking months, and you don’t say a fucking word. Last time I saw you I got chased away at fucking gunpoint, and you didn’t give a shit. Didn’t even come by to get all the crap you left laying around _my_ fucking house, and _now_ you care? No, you don’t give a shit about me, you cut me out of your life just like you do to everything you don’t want to deal with anymore. Stop acting like your the fucking good guy here.”

You back up quickly as he moves forwards and you find yourself with your back against the outer wall of the bar, stuck facing him. You feel heat behind your eyes, building, and your face feels hot. You don’t want to cry, not in front of him. He’s right, and you don’t get to guilt him like this, you don’t get to feel bad when your the one that hurt him to begin with, but you sniffle he looks up at you. You know you must look like hell, that you must be red eyed and pathetic looking, and his eyes widen and his hands unclench.

“Fuck,” He backs up abruptly. “I’m sorry.”

You want to laugh, because you should be the one telling him that, but your too focused on trying to calm yourself down.

He’s still staring at you, biting at his thumbnail. “I, uh, shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean it.” You nod jerkily. “Hey, Ian, look at me. I didn’t mean it.”

Your gaze is fixed over his shoulder, and you swallow a little bit. “No.” You say. “You’re right. I-” You pause to glance at him and then you look away immediately. “I fucked up.” Your voice cracks around the words.

“You’re sick.” He says, and you momentarily think about all those months ago when he was telling you to go to the hospital, right when everything went to shit. “You weren’t in your right mind. It’s not your fault. I get that.”

You shake your head, sitting down on the sidewalk and leaning your back against the wall. “That’s not an excuse. I can’t write things off like that.” You swallow, wondering the best way to go about this. “I did bad things, Mick. I made a lot of bad choices, I hurt you.” You look up at him. He’s watching you intently, hanging on your every word. “And that wasn’t all the disorder, that was me; fucking up everything I care about.” You itch the back of your hand for a second. “And it was a fucking mistake. It took me a while to really get that, I thought I could get on on my own, and everything was really hazy for a while, but I’m taking the meds now, I’m getting better.”

You stare downwards, clenching your jaw and nodding to yourself, trying to convince yourself that you _are_ improving, but you can’t. You don’t know if your going to fly of the handle five minutes from now, you don’t know if your going to have the will to pull yourself out of bed and into the shower tomorrow morning, you don’t know if your going to keep yourself from running away at a moments notice three months from now, and it scares the shit out of you, but you can’t allow yourself to fall into that pit of uncertainty and self hatred, because your doing things _right_ this time, your keeping yourself in line. You look up at Mickey, stare him directly in the eye, and finish off your monologue “And I fucking _miss you_.”

He’s chewing on his lip now, looking down at you while he teeters on the edge of a decision, and then he slowly lowers himself down next to you, so that your not quite touching but still sitting quite close, a feeling of camaraderie washing over you. You sit in silence together for a minute or so, watching as a lady pushes a stroller down the sidewalk across the street from you, and your so caught up in your own thoughts that you almost miss him speak, his voice the quiet genuine one that he used to use early in the morning as he would lay in bed with you, the sheets twisted around you and your hands running across every inch of him. “Me too.”

You glance at him hesitantly, and take a deep breath before reaching your hand out a little bit. You hover over his leg uncertainly, and when he doesn’t back away, you place your hand down gently just below his knee. You might be imagining it, but you think he leans into his touch. You’re scared of breaking the silence, but there are so many things you want to ask, in the time you’ve been apart you’ve imagined a thousand - no, a million, a billion, an infinite number of possibilities of things you wanted to say to him, you wanted to ask him. They range from telling him about your day, a song that you heard that made you think of him, to asking him the deeper questions, the ones that make your heart ache, but you don’t ask any of them now. You look straight at him and he looks over at you, and your faces are half a foot apart and you ask him in a small voice “So how’ve you been?”

This time he answers.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, I'm apparently going to be writing quite a few of these because I need them to fix their damn relationship.
> 
> Come say hi at mickeyswaitingforme.tumblr.com


End file.
